knitted pixelations

Rusy Scruby at Cris Worley Fine Art by Cinzia Franceschini

The Cosmatesque pavements of Roman cathedrals, the juxtaposed brushstrokes of Georges Seurat’s pointillist paintings, the dizzying tessellations of M.C. Escher’s woodcuts, the hexagonal cells that constitute the structures of beehives...when confronted with a work by Rusty Scruby, the drawers of the mind open to an endless loop of visual references. Like the repeated hexagons of his compositions, different ideas multiply. Diverse threads are knotted, drawing from the realms of the arts, natural sciences, and geometry formularies.

Scruby’s contemporary inlays displayed at Cris Worley Fine Arts in Dallas are striking in technique and content. The tiling patterns are crafted by hand-weaving dyed wool of varying hues. The artist fragments complex images into colorful regular hexagons, through a process that is not too different from that of digital pixel deconstruction. The fragmented units acquire meaning in the viewer’s retina once perceived as a whole.

Rusty’s artworks are genuinely the happy outcome of a mathematical mind, a creative spirit, and fine craftsmanship. His perfect interlocks play with the viewer’s optical perception: everything seems extremely logical, yet their programmed regularity leaves a sense of unfinishedness. It may be the interference between the heterogeneity of the colors and the homogeneity of the pattern theycre ate. It might be the seemingly abstract figures behind which are archival photographs of family and landscapes. Perhaps it could be the dissonance between the knitting technique, so physical and traditional, and the composition that looks like a digital image, broken down into pixels.

However, something in Rusty Scruby’s knitted paintings continues to elude us, requiring further investigative effort.

Born in 1964 in Oregon City and currently based in Dallas, the artist is no stranger to Cris Worley Fine Arts gallery, presenting his 6th solo exhibition. This latest body of works, created between 2022 and 2023, shows his recent art research focused on the technique of knitting; a passion inherited from childhood. The craftsmanship of textile work blends with the artist’s varied educational background, including aerospace engineering studies at Texas A&M University and the practice of piano. Maths, knitting, and music composition intersect like different pieces of a single puzzle in Rusty Scruby’s art practice. His knitted inlays are an artistic rendering of the methodical eclecticism that characterizes his life.

The subject of intersection underlies all the investigations presented in Clouds. These are not just material intersections, dealing with fiber compositions and intarsia of regular polygons, but intersections also oper- ate on a lyrical and mental level. Rusty Scruby’s production collimates art and maths. It juxtaposes the geometric grids of mathematics, the pixel vision of the digital world, with cues coming from the natural and emotional world. The actual title Clouds itself makes one think simultaneously of meteorological and computer phenomena, of natural and artificial landscapes. Reinforcing this interpretation are two other works presented in the gallery in addition to the textile compositions Thanksgiving, Clouds, Neon Clouds, and Walking Stick. These are two archival

The ultimate in modern chill.

// couds 2022, 2022 hand-knit indie dyed Highland wool using the intarsia technique 51h x 73w in photographic reconstructions realized in 2023 and entitled Array and Continuum. Both photographic reconstructions suggest landscapes: a sky dotted with clouds and the foam of sea waves. However, a closer look reveals an overlapping grid, a geometric texture that seeks regularity in random phenomena. Nature is an inexhaustible source of inspiration for Rusty Scruby. His childhood spent on the Island of Kwajalein, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean led him to be in close contact with the lush flora and the natural transitions of the sky and question the regular structures of leaves and shells. Between spirals, fractals, and iterations, Scruby’s art practice reveals the constructive logic underlying natural reality: like an attempt to give logical form to an impalpable flow.

Clouds presents the culmination of this research, increas- ingly tending toward abstraction. In the exhibit, we find common features of the artist’s previous production. We find his interest in the reconstruction of archival photographs, in hexagonal and circular patterns, and in the technique of knitting, which shifts from three-dimensional cubic structures to two-dimensional compositions. These recognizable trademarks have brought him appreciation in national and international exhibitions, from private collectors such as the Microsoft Corporation and from public institutions such as the Art Museum of Southeast Texas and The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston.

However, there is in his engineering technique always something innovative and elusive. Rusty Scruby’s images are both regular and blurred, objective and intimate. His compositions blur like a nostalgic memory losing its sharpness. And it is this feeling of dematerialization, like a glitch in the video game screen, a missing piece in a programmed code, a temporary lapse, that makes them so fascinating. Rusty Scruby’s knitted pixelations stand between the desire to preserve, to hold everything together, and the inevitability of loss.

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